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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Fictional justice',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2018/07/15.jpg" alt="BICYCLES CROSSING ROADWAY" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="dreams">
	<h2>Dream journal</h2>
	<p>
		I wasn&apos;t going to talk about it yet, not until I got much further in development, but now it&apos;s come up in a dream.
		Now that I know why <code>minequest</code> is a total bust, that its goal is to both change Minetest drastically and not change it hardly at all, I&apos;ve started work on a mod that&apos;s much more self-consistent.
		As of late, I&apos;ve been calling it <code>alchemy2</code>.
		The premise is that you earn a point for each stack of each material you mine, and you can spend two points, one of each of two types, to synthesise a new material that takes on properties of each of the materials you spent points from.
		For example, if you combines a pine sapling with cotton, you&apos;d probably get a dyable sapling that would grow into a coloured tree.
		If that sapling grew near snow, you&apos;d get coloured snow back from the sapling growth as well.
	</p>
	<p>
		I&apos;ve hit a bit of a roadblock.
		The palette system in Minetest is poorly thought out, using colour channel multiplication instead of addition (or even subtraction).
		This makes it impossible to have nodes look good when their palettes include colours of drastically different luminosities.
		You can try chalking it up to a different design that caters to a different type of coloured node than what I&apos;m trying to build, but that doesn&apos;t make sense either.
		The documentation specifically says it&apos;s for wool-like multicolour nodes.
		Wool in the game comes in both black and white, among other colours, and with such drastically different colours in the palette, some will have the details magnified more while others will have the patterns reduced.
		You can make any one wool colour come out right by changing the main texture, but if you make white wool work, you&apos;ll have a hard time making out the pattern on the black wool, and if you make the black wool look good, the white wool becomes over-exaggerated and ugly.
		I theorise that the only way to pull it off is to have every colour on the palette share a certain characteristic.
		My best guess is that this characteristic is a sphere-calculated luminosity across the three colour channels.
		Like maybe a curve of 255 = ∛(red<sup>3</sup> + green<sup>3</sup> + blue<sup>3</sup>) would do it.
		This would only take up a little over half the palette, even if you gave each blue/green combination a pixel on the palette and calculated the appropriate red value for it, but I suspect you could set up a second curve to fill in the gaps and everything would be fine.
		The luminosity of the second curve would be different from the first, but as long as it was similar enough, you might not run into issues.
		It&apos;s just that black and white are too different.
	</p>
	<p>
		I&apos;ve tried in vain to come up with a use case in which colour multiplication instead of addition or subtraction would be a good option.
		There just doesn&apos;t seem to be a good reason for this design decision.
		I&apos;ve found types of nodes that can pull off a palette without a luminosity curve to guide them, nodes that include both black and white on their palettes, but it&apos;s always nodes in which the detailing doesn&apos;t matter much, such as glass nodes.
		You hardly notice the coloured variations in the visible part of the glass anyway, as you&apos;re too busy looking <strong>*through*</strong> the invisible part.
	</p>
	<p>
		Anyway, I dreamed I&apos;d just missed something in the $a[API] documentation.
		I dreamed I&apos;d found it, and now had a way to make the palette either act in the stupid way it does in the real world or in the proper way I actually need it to.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion post for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Well that&apos;s certainly a twist: a religion in which the deity is indifferent to warship!
			You&apos;ve got to wonder why in most religions, even the modern ones of today, the god or gods crave the warship of us lowly mortals.
			It makes more sense that a god or gods would be indifferent to us.
			The god being a destructive one that doesn&apos;t care about you one way or the other is a nice touch as well.
		</p>
		<p>
			You mention that the space travel aspect seems plausible, but I&apos;d argue the religious and suicidal part seems plausible too.
			People make all sorts of bad decisions in the name of religion, including intentional suicide and even murder.
			This incidental suicide through use of a sacred object isn&apos;t far fetched at all.
			What I wonder though is why these people hold onto such a sacred relic.
			They believe it to be a gift from their god, but they also believe their god doesn&apos;t care about them and all gifts from this god are incidental.
			In other words, the god didn&apos;t give it to them intentionally, and if they had, they wouldn&apos;t&apos;ve done it to help the people out.
			This &quot;gift&quot; is know to cause death with seemingly no benefits.
			Their god doesn&apos;t care if they use it or toss it in some hole somewhere were it&apos;ll never see the light of day again.
			So why bother with such a troublesome thing?
			They think it can&apos;t be destroyed, but they don&apos;t need to destroy it.
			They just need to stop using it and put it somewhere it won&apos;t kill people.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<p>
		After writing up my discussion post, I wrote up a fake news article based on a story I read for class.
		We each chose a story from a provided list, offering some flexibility.
		Writing up the article was unexpectedly fun.
		The story takes place in a world in which ...
		Actually, just read my discussion post, contained in my journal entry from two days ago.
		It explains the setting.
		Anyway, the father-to-be murders two people, then commits suicide, in an effort to open up spaces in humanity for all three of his triplets to be allowed to live.
		After all, a cap has been put on the population to prevent the lack of resources we see due to overpopulation in today&apos;s world.
	</p>
	<p>
		If you know me, you know I feel life is pointless because it ends.
		When we die, we lose everything that we ever were.
		Death is a fate worse than never having existed, which is why the main reason I&apos;ll never have children of my own, but when you murder someone, you&apos;re not causing their death.
		You&apos;re only causing it their death to come sooner.
		They were going to die either way, it was just a matter of when.
		It&apos;s the parents that created the life that caused the inevitable death.
		Murder is still a heinous crime and I in no way support it.
		However, the damage it does is limited.
	</p>
	<p>
		Imagine a world without ageing though, and without disease, such as the one presented in the story.
		Death is no longer meaningless.
		Life can go on forever, so it&apos;s no longer the meaningless blip in history that it once was.
		Murder may be heinous in our modern world, but in this theoretical future world, it&apos;s so much worse.
		You&apos;re no longer just moving up the date of death, you&apos;re <strong>*actually causing*</strong> the death!
	</p>
	<p>
		Our fake news articles gave us a chance to derive from the worlds offered by the authors of the stories we chose.
		In my version of the story&apos;s world, I got to ensure that the murderer didn&apos;t get their way; that their murders were in vain.
		As they didn&apos;t go through the proper channels, I even got to make sure their own suicide was in vain.
		They wanted so badly to save all three of their children, newborns that weren&apos;t even really people yet.
		Newborn humans don&apos;t really have any of the mental capacity that makes humans stand out from other animals.
		They wanted to save these newborns that they&apos;d never even gotten a chance to see yet so badly that they were willing to commit two homicides to make it happen.
		So I made sure all three of them were put down.
		Had they done what was right, one of the three children could live, though the grandfather would die.
		But because they resorted to murder, all three children they sought to save were snuffed out, though I had the grandfather survive in the process.
		Making sure the murderer failed so completely in their plan, to the point where they&apos;d&apos;ve gotten closer to their objective had they <strong>*not*</strong> killed off innocent people, felt awesome.
		Justice was served.
		People are programmed to think infanticide is one of the worst forms of murder.
		This gut-wrenching belief is part of how our species carries on.
		But infants don&apos;t even possess any of what makes humans special yet.
		If I have to kill off a few fictional babies to make sure the murderer fails, so be it.
	</p>
	<p>
		Of course, if it wasn&apos;t just a story, it wouldn&apos;t be so cut and dry.
		I wouldn&apos;t&apos;ve made sure all the children died to pay for the crimes of the father.
		I&apos;m not sure exactly what I would&apos;ve done, but it would&apos;ve taken more ethical thought.
		Two of the children were already scheduled to die.
		I don&apos;t think I would&apos;ve allowed the murders to override that, as it would&apos;ve made a statement to the public that you can expand your family through opening slots through murder.
		It would&apos;ve caused murders to be more likely to occur in the future.
		It&apos;d set a bad precedent.
		But maybe I wouldn&apos;t have the great grandfather take back his offer to lay down his life, so one of the children could live.
		And maybe I&apos;d&apos;ve allowed the suicide to save one of the other children.
		The mother just lost her husband through no fault of her own, so keeping one of her other children might&apos;ve served as a token consolation.
		Instead of losing two children, she&apos;d only have to lose one.
		Additionally, saving one of your children through suicide is an action we can allow.
		Sure, the father didn&apos;t go through the proper channels ... but on the whole, it&apos;s not a story that will inspire violence in the public of that world once the news is released.
		Suicide has already been legalised in the world of the story, it&apos;s just that most people choose to go to the gas chambers rather than commit the act themselves.
		Most people who want to or are willing to die want to have someone else kill them painlessly, rather than have to bring themselves to flip their own lights out.
	</p>
	<p>
		My goal for tomorrow should be to complete the grading for the week, and try completing at least one of the learning journal assignments.
		The other learning journal assignment will require some further research, and might not be completable tomorrow.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
